And so the final episode begins. Endgame. Minecraft is now on the Xbox 360. Say goodbye to your friends, family, and all other loved ones. Sure, it’s been on the PC for a while now but the added convenience of party chat and everything else about the Xbox has always been nice. Considering this is technically a port, this won’t be a review of Minecraft but rather how well does it play on the Xbox 360. I could spend a novel telling you how Minecraft is played but that’d be dumb and boring of me. You know how to play Minecraft, and if you don’t, you’ve been missing out.

This might be a short one, but you all know what to expect. Minecraft is Minecraft. It plays and looks beautifully on the Xbox 360. I played on a full 1080p 37″ HDTV and the first time I jumped into a game, it took me a second to get used to it. Things on the main menu are pretty basic. There’s your play game, a tutorial, achievements and interestingly enough, leaderboards. Leaderboards rank from who has traveled the furthest to farming to killing creatures. Interesting stuff.

Once booting up the game you have the ability to make it private and even just offline. You can save different worlds to play in (the game auto saves every now and then while in a world). While it’s not servers, it’s still pretty cool. Minecraft also features up to 4 player split screen, which is a nice touch. One of the coolest parts of the port is you can even enter seed numbers to start a world off with. These can all be found scattered across the harsh wasteland that is the internet. Aside from this, you can even just jump into other players’ worlds if their lobby is set to be open to the public. Besides that, you’ll only be joining your buddies. The game has four difficulties: Peaceful, Easy, Medium and Hard. This is the only problem I have with the port (but it can, and in all likelihood will be fixed), there’s no creative mode like there is in the PC version. While you can have peaceful so you’re not battling monsters at night (the original point of the game), the game will not release with the creative mode that gives you unlimited of all the blocks. So if you’re like me and just want to build sweet ass castles, you have to actually do the work the way a sucker does it. I’m not going to hate on it. After all, I did play the game this way for a long time. But becoming spoiled with the creative mode makes me wish I could just build. Just building with my buddies over Xbox for hours will be a good time, but it’d be that much crazier if we had access to everything instantly.

One of the better features of the game is that it really is totally revamped for consoles. Controls are just as friendly as they are on the PC. There’s never any awkward time that bothers you the way the mobile editions do (for me, anyways). You hit the Y button for your inventory and a mouse is brought up that you control with the joystick. The nicest part of this port is the crafting. You hit X to craft basic objects. You hit X near a crafting table to obviously craft more. The biggest change is the game actually shows you every recipe and lets you create each item once you have the necessary ingredients. This way you’re not searching the Minecraft wiki to find out about secret items. In game tips are also a nice touch for the novice player.

Overall, Minecraft is definitely all that fans have been waiting for on consoles. It plays perfectly and friendly, letting you control the difficulty. While my beloved creative mode doesn’t ship with launch, the game’s main menu does sport a downloadable content spot which more than just tells me it’ll eventually be added into the game. It plays just as well as on PC and you’ll become just as addicted as you’ve ever been. Your limit is your own imagination. The only thing that could bring this to an early demise is little support for DLC, but given the size of the community, it’s unlikely it won’t. Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition will be available this coming Wednesday, May 9th and is rather pricy (but will be worth your money) at 1600 Microsoft points.

95/100

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About The Author: Brett

Brett founded NEG in 2010 because he's loved games his whole life. Combining his knowledge with others in the local gaming scene has resulted in something special. In addition to the website, he coordinates gaming charity events and works in digital marketing. His favorites are shooters and adventure games. He will also destroy you in any instrument in Rock Band or Guitar Hero (including singing).